A standard-gauge railroad once climbed over the divide to Aspen

Aspen’s silver boom needed a way to move ore out and supplies in, and railroads answered. In the late 1880s two lines pushed toward the Roaring Fork Valley. One of them, the Colorado Midland Railway, took a hard route: a standard-gauge line that climbed the high country and crossed the Continental Divide through a tunnel bored near Hagerman Pass, east of the valley.

Reaching Aspen by rail helped the town grow during the silver years. Ore could leave for distant smelters, and people and goods could arrive far faster than by wagon over a pass.

But the route fought the mountains. Snow at that elevation made the high crossing slow and difficult to keep open in winter. Then the collapse of silver prices cut deeply into the railroad’s traffic, and the company fell on hard financial times in the years that followed. In the early twentieth century the line was abandoned, and traces of the old grade still sit in the high country today.

This is part of why Aspen looks the way it does. The town did not appear by accident; it was tied into a transportation network built for mining, and when that network unwound, the town went quiet for decades.

For the documented railroad and mining history of the area, start with History Colorado’s pages on Aspen’s historic resources and Colorado mining.